Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. James Carroll

now versus then; ethical present versus apocalyptic future; Gospel versus history; fiction versus truth; metaphorical versus metaphysical.

      This divided-mindedness may have come into its own in modernity, but it pervades our story, reaching all the way back nearly to the start. For one factor to rise, another must fall. Such a dynamic, in fact, long ago overwhelmed the Christian imagination, which, as we shall see, took its final form from an extreme conflict—not the contentions of doctrinal dispute, but the savagery of violence—that was inflicted on believers, extreme conflict that ultimately set the Church against the Synagogue: the primordial oppositionalism.

      But what happens when a mind openly in the grip of such habitual dichotomizing encounters the experience of long-dead strangers who were at first not given to thinking this way? To acknowledge essential ignorance about how precisely those strangers took in reality, and expressed themselves about it, is the beginning of a new sort of understanding. That returns us to our initial and greatest oppositional set: the paradox of Jesus the human who is Christ the divine.

      As war in the twentieth century gives us our starting point, war in the first and second centuries will give this account its largest shape. The Gospel writers had an intuition, and it was shared by their readers, that only within the context of meaning provided by Jesus Christ could the extreme disruptive experiences they were undergoing make sense, or be survived. Jesus—as first made available in the drama of his usurping a rival, or mentor, named John the Baptist; and then in the other dramas that brought him to Jerusalem and the “place of the skull,” Golgotha—was the key to the meaning of God’s covenant in the new context of violent strife. Jesus, that is, was the figure in whom the in extremis fulfillment of God’s promise could be seen. God was faithful to Jesus, up to and through death. The Gospel readers, at the mercy of war, desperately needed to know of that faithfulness, and to find it on offer to them.

      But God’s “faithfulness,” as the essence of good news, was later replaced in the heart of belief by the “faith” of the Church, as defined by the loyalty oath of creeds. Modern readers of the sacred texts have attempted to enter that distant world of implication with the “doctrinal” Christ at the threshold, but twentieth-century incredulity about doctrine itself slammed that door for many. At another, once promising threshold stood a figure deemed to be the “historical Jesus,” but the impossibility of getting reliably behind the sources kept the academics bickering, and the meaning of Jesus seemed more elusive than ever. And why shouldn’t most laypeople remain indifferent to the contentious work of Jesus scholars?

      Yet in an inquiry like this, scholarship must be key. Indeed, modern theologians and historians have laid the path for us, and, despite the squabbling, what a golden road that work opens up. The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch calls Jesus scholarship of the past two centuries “perhaps the most thoroughgoing and sophisticated analysis of any set of texts in the history of human thought.”⁴⁵ Informed by such scholarship, I am attempting an instance of faith submitted to reason, which, in this era, means doctrine rescued from all that is doctrinaire. Therefore, the beloved Creed must be criticized. Its every word, the theologian Hans Küng writes, “must be translated into the post-Copernican, post-Kantian, indeed post-Darwinian and post-Einsteinian world, just as former generations, too, had to understand the same Creed anew at decisive shifts of historical epoch.”⁴⁶ History shapes faith, which might seem the most banal of observations, yet in a tradition that long ago set itself against history, it is revolutionary. But the current epoch—shaped not only by Copernicus and company but by the moral challenge of which Bonhoeffer is an avatar—has forced the question anew. Critical belief is the only humane belief, a simple fact that follows from the endowments of mind with which our Creator showers us.

      So theologians and historians do indeed center this work, but the interpretation offered here draws on witnesses, too—mostly, in my case, the silent witness of the fellow believers with whom I rub elbows in the Communion line on Sundays. With them, I routinely submit reason to faith, knowing that the endowments of mind are insufficient to account for themselves. At Mass, fortunately, there is a place for mental vacancy, too—the quiet contemplation that is not the enemy of critical thought, but its trustworthy companion. My fellows in the pew sustain my faith. With them, I stand to hear the Gospel read, and they help me to pay attention.

      The Gospel writers had what we might call a theological concern, but they were not doing theology. They had reference to received data from the past, but they were not doing history. The closest we can come to what those ancient authors were up to is simply to say that they were telling a story. Against all that is doctrinaire and historicist, the intuition that drives the present work is that the simple story of Jesus—whatever the history behind the story—offers a necessary structure of meaning, and perhaps even a mode of survival. Stories exist to be taken, first, at face value, even if, second, they demand to be read in light of theological reflection and historical criticism. Stories deserve to be thought about, yes—but mostly to be taken in.

      So creeds, doctrines, and the scientific method of textual analysis all give expression to the meaning of the Gospel—but they are not the Gospel. The Gospel is the story. What this work is doing, between the brackets of theology and history, is returning to the story. We are doing so if only because, as story, the Gospel of Jesus Christ has braced the human imagination in a way far surpassing any other artistic or intellectual creation. Its meaning for culture, its primacy in Western civilization, would be enough. Yet more than culture is at stake here.

      Culture, of course, shapes this inquiry—shapes me. I am a Catholic, informed by the Catholic tradition, but the enforcers of Catholic orthodoxy are not sitting on my shoulder. The only authority I assert is the authority of what I think. I make no claim to objectivity. Indeed, my entire point is subjective, however much the writing aims to be critically informed. The wonder of the way God works in history lies in the fact that the core proclamation of what’s called good news powerfully arises out of what is time-bound, as well as out of the thicket of failure so vividly on display in what precedes and follows. Human fallibility marks the story at hand as much in its first century as in its twenty-first.

      But unlike the work of theologians and historians, this work also asks whether the story of Jesus should be the starting point at all. “Jesus is the answer” is scrawled on the walls of tenements and prison cells, but sometimes, just below it, one also reads the addendum “What is the question?” After Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the true gateposts of the Secular Age, the question is not the survival of belief as much as the survival of the human species itself. As this reflection begins in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s cell, and in my own youthful faith, it will move through the harshest of challenges, including the unrelenting darkness of war and its resulting ideology of oppositionalism, to find a pragmatic way forward in the world as it is. The faith we seek, the Jesus Christ we aim to retrieve, is the key to a new meaning of redemption, which is, for the first time in history, nothing less than the literal possibility of a human future. We look again for Jesus Christ because we need a reason now for hope. The end of this book is not threat, but promise.

CHAPTER ONE

       Personal Jesus

      Jesus Christ, with His divine understanding of every cranny of our human nature, understood that not all men were called to the religious life, that by far the vast majority were forced to live in the world, and, to a certain extent, for the world.

      —James Joyce¹

Where Is God?

      The word “genocide” and I are exactly the same age. It is, perhaps, outrageously narcissistic of me to strike an autobiographical note in relation to the historic crime that, until then, had no name, yet the coincidence of timing somehow explains the obsessiveness of my Catholic preoccupation with the fate of Jews. So yes, “genocide” was coined the year I was born.² It was the year that Los Alamos opened and the year Auschwitz became a true killing factory.³ The arc of the years since then defines the curve of the recognitions that shape this